Then in 2010 Power Pivot in Excel/SharePoint, then Power View in SharePoint

Then in 2013 Power BI … Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query, Power Map.. In Excel and Office 365.

Now in 2015 Power BI Version 2. Not in Office 365, separate. Power BI Designer, or use the Power BI web site to set up your dashboards, mobile, etc.

All the while, the existing solutions that have been available previously are still there and available, making things… well, confusing to say the least.

Most shops .. It all depends on when they started going heavy BI with the Microsoft tools, on where they land. Also, how well they could move when things change, as well as how much they want to stay up to date with the tools.

If you started 10+ years ago, you probably have a good base of ETLs written in SSIS, as well as many multi-dimensional (MD) OLAP cubes in SSAS, and SSRS reports off your cubes and data warehouse, running in SSRS Native Mode. You started with SQL 2000 if you were lucky, with cubes and dts packages, but then SQL 2005, then 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2 and now are on 2014. You really liked 2005 SP2 and 2008 R2 for the BI features :). This setup is like the VB6 or .NET Winforms of BI. It will probably be around forever in some way shape or form but not a ton of updates and Microsoft has moved on.

If you started a little later you might have SSRS in SharePoint mode, and some Performance Point dashboards. You might have even used Performance Point for planning/budgeting (and loved it?) until Microsoft killed it. Then you had to look for alternatives for that, or use OLAP Cube Writeback. In my opinion, SSRS in SharePoint and Performance Point are dead. Not dead as in they don’t work or won’t be supported, but I see them as the wrong path, life supported direction. If you are still using these heavy I would look for alternatives.

Now it gets interesting. You started with Excel 2010 and PowerPivot (no space!) and had SharePoint 2010 setup and Power View in SharePoint. You created V1 Power Pivot models, they were limited, you could do some things, but still it was limited. You still needed to get data somewhere so SSIS ETL’s or something to get data in tables you can use. If you are using Power View in SharePoint, I would hurry up and look for alternatives, it is dead (my definition of dead like SSRS/PP in SharePoint). Excel 2010 is long past and V1 PowerPivot is dead too. Seems like this era was short lived and just a stepping stone.

Then, in 2013, Power BI. So they added a space to Power Pivot :) .. And made it better, v2. Added missing features, Tabular SSAS cubes even! And Power View could be used in Excel. They both came by default in Excel (depends on version) but turned off. Power Query came out of nowhere and is awesome and Power Map, while buggy, was better than nothing. But what do you do with all these solutions you build? Where to publish? Not SharePoint on prem? But Power BI in SharePoint Online.. So you need Office 365 and Power BI subscription. You set up Data Management Gateway so you can get to your on prem data sources. You can refresh once a day or manually. You can do some pretty cool things, create workbooks with pivots and Power Views.

But you are missing things. Missing things like the ability to schedule a report to run and email someone, like SSRS. You are missing awesome formatting abilities for every pixel like SSRS. You wonder when SSRS is going to come to Power BI or what your options are… you hope you see iterations and features released to Power BI as that is the path, but then..

New Power BI Preview comes out in 2015. It has a standalone Power BI Designer (reminiscent of the Performance Point designer) that lets you create reports, dashboards and save a file to publish to the NEW Power BI portal. So you have two Power BI portals.. New and old. They don’t overlap or talk to each other, the licensing is different, etc. The old Power BI lets you connect to SQL on prem with refresh with the DMG and other data sources, etc. The new one does not. The new one lets you connect to GitHub and SalesForce and Marketo, but not other data sources that the old Power BI did. The new Power BI lets you connect to on-prem TABULAR SSAS cubes with refresh, but not MD ones (yet). The new Power BI lets you connect to excel data in OneDrive/OneDrive for Business. So could one publish a data file out to ODFB to faux refresh? I have yet to try. The new Power BI lets you publish dashboards to the iOS Mobile apps and also embed (up to 10 MB – which needs change to be bigger) on websites. New Power BI has an API that lets you create your own connectors / REST API for things. And the list goes on and on.

So where does that leave us? Well, of you invested time and money in BI the last 10 years, you might feel like Microsoft is abandoning you. It kind of seems that way. You need to change or get left behind. But what do you change to? Change your MD cubes to Tabular? Rethink your architecture? Sync data to Azure? Power Pivot/Power Query? Abandon SharePoint as a BI tool? Move your reports from SSRS to something else or Power BI (if you can?) I am unsure. Still trying to figure it all out.

One thing for sure is, it will always keep evolving. Me, I would say, tabular first if you are on prem. Try to use Power BI where you can. Minimize SSRS reports. Use SSRS native instead of SharePoint. Stop using PerformancePoint if you are still using it or thinking about it. I bet at some point SSRS comes to the new Power BI – there is an item on the UserVoice forum already asking for it. Try the Power BI Designer and Website and see what you can do. Always be trying to get something going in the newest and latest technology/tools available.

I am in a lot of meetings. A LOT of meetings. Double, triple, quad booked. I guess when you get to manager or director level somewhere, that is the definition of “busy”, or maybe everyone just wants you in their meeting, or your opinion, or whatever. In the end “Meetings are Toxic” (from 37signals), but really the are sometimes a necessary evil.

Anyways, do you really know where you spend all your time? Well you can glean the information pretty easily using Excel and Microsoft Power BI (Power Query specifically).

First, the key for me is to “categorize” my meetings. You can create categories in Outlook and then assign them to meetings, you can even color code the categories.

Where does Power Query fit in? Well, you can connect to Exchange as a data source.

Then you can query your calendar “table”, and pull it into Excel.

Then, as with any table, you can Pivot it, and pull over category as the row, and look at the count. With some column work in the Power Query query, you can split out the date/time and get Month/Day/Year and create a semi-hierarchy, to see things over time.

For example, I took over 2 teams in January, and my meetings with them and related projects skyrocketed in January. Now I know what was taking my time up for Q1 2014 :)

At least the number is going down :)

There is so much more you can do with Power BI and Exchange data, your email, calendars, contacts, etc, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it should only take you 10 minutes or so to get to this result! Now, if I can just figure out how to get out of the meetings!

With the latest “Polar Vortex” or whatever that is happening, EVERYONE is talking about the weather. Everyone always talks about how it has been this cold many times, etc, etc. “It was colder in my day” – ok. Well prove it!

So I took a look at the NOAA data you can get here http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/ and got an extract to CSV for my hometown of Chisholm, MN (actually the Hibbing/Chisholm airport since it has data from 1962 to today)

I downloaded the CSV, opened in Excel 2013 and imported into Power Query. I think did some formatting to get the date parts and a date field, and converted the “tenths of a degree of Celsius” to Fahrenheit. Then started analyzing.

I will have to refresh this after this cold spell, because it only has data to 1/1/2014 and these last few days have been cold, but, not the coldest.

Back when I was 16, in 1996, there was a stretch of days in January that were COLD. The data supports this. First I took all the days with a Low temp of UNDER -35 degrees F.

You can see, there are a bunch of days in Jan/Feb 1996 that were UNDER -35 Degrees F. So then I copied that pivot and expanded on that date range to see all the days.

Pretty dang cold from 1/19/1996 to 2/4/1996. Lowest day was -50 Degrees F. Average of -31 Degrees F. Of course these are “real” temps, it was even colder with wind chill. These last 3-4 days of -20 to -40 are cold, but not sure they are colder than in Jan 1996. We will see when it is all said and done.

If you can’t remember how cold it was, NOAA, Excel and Power Query can remind you. :)

If you are using Active Directory Federation and you want to see what users are logging in when to what external service, you can analyze the ADFS server IIS logs. It is pretty straightforward since it is just IIS.

First, get to your ADFS box, get to the IIS log directory, usually something like “C:WindowsSystem32LogFilesW3SVC1” and grab those logs.

Now, you can write sql type queries against your logs. For ADFS logs, we don’t care so much about many of the columns, but primarily username and date, maybe the URI for filtering, maybe the referrer or the user agent to see what browsers your users are using, but to get say, unique logins per day for a given service, we just need the date, username and URI.

Remember the date is probably UTC so you need to use a function to convert, or leave as is if you want, and everything is pretty much all relative depending on how accurate you want things to be. hint: TO_TIMESTAMP(date, time) AS utc-timestamp, TO_LOCALTIME(utc-timestamp) AS local-timestamp

Now, here is the LogParser query:
logparser "SELECT DISTINCT cs-username, date INTO FROM WHERE cs-username NULL and cs-uri-query LIKE '%your service%'"

Note in the statement the output path and your log path, change to what yours are. Also, the LIKE statement. For example, to query for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, I used

LIKE ‘%dynamicscrm%’

Run that query, then open the .csv you exported to. Format the data as a table, pivot it by user, pivot by date. Get the unique number of days using a date diff, analyze logins per day, logins per user. Tie to Active Directory (using Power Query) to add some dimension attributes like title or department and very quickly you can analyze what users, departments etc are using your service.

I have blogged before about we use Yammer. Some interesting data can be gleaned from the usage of Yammer. One thing though is that the data and usage stats are limited in the Yammer area, but you can get all the data and take a look at things. I ran into Yamanalysis and decided to give it a try.

After getting Ruby, Rails, MySQL, curl/curb, GraphViz, IBM WordCloud and whatever else configured, I finally got it working. (FYI – MySQL 5.0 – you need to run the config wizard as administrator on Windows 7 or it just hangs at the end).

Pretty cool data and analysis from a higher level. Of course after getting everything working, I wanted to hit the data with PowerPivot. This sounds like an easy feat, but yet seemed to be a complicated task.

I first got the ODBC connector 5.1 for MySQL (Since PowerPivot doesn’t natively connect to MySQL,and 5.1 since that is the only one I could find reliably and get to work.), and set up an ODBC source. Tests fine.

In PowerPivot, I would run through the wizard and it would get architecture mismatches, and catastrophic failures, trying to test the connection. Ignoring that and moving forward, running a query would just hang on import forever. I tried different DSN’s, User/System DSNs, etc, to no avail.

What I ended up doing was firing up my local Microsoft SQL instance, and creating a linked server through a system DSN to the MySQL instance, then I could query the data fine from SQL. I opened up PowerPivot, connected to SQL local and then ran the query to MySQL and it work. What a workaround, what a hack, but at least I can hit the data in PowerPivot locally, which was my goal here.

Of course I could take what Yamanalysis is doing and dump to SQL, or do something similar in C# and dump to SQL, that might be a project for another day.

Pretty cool. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in the cloud. Limited, but you can create docs, share them, edit them, with *no software* installed on your system. Good in a pinch, good to sync some docs up that you might want to edit, good on a relatives computer that doesn’t have office.

Where have I started to use it more though? OneNote. What is OneNote? Well, before Office 2010, OneNote was installed as a separate application with Office. Kind of like Visio. My biggest problem with OneNote was that I was stuck to my laptop, or whatever. Had to be on the actual box.

Now, you can create a OneNote notebook in the cloud, and edit it in the browser, or on your machine. OneNote also has some cool features, like

“You can now share your notes with other OneNote users in real time by hosting or participating in shared note-taking sessions. Over a live connection, you can work together on a project or share a read-only copy of your notes with an audience.”. It also integrates nicely with tablet/bamboo and mic/text/voice recognition, as well as Outlook and meetings, etc. Integration everywhere.

I actually like OneNote better than Evernote – but Evernote I can get on my computers, web, iPad and iPhone. Yes, there is a OneNote iPhone app (MobileNoter) but you have to install a client, blah blah. Should just work over the cloud.

Anyways, if you need office online in a pinch, try office.live.com, but also check out OneNote and using it with others to share/read notes in real time, really cool features.

I have been reading about Microsoft’s PivotViewer lately, and decided to try to get it going for myself. What is PivotViewer? Think of it as visual data slicing through a web page.

What you do is take some data, and then tie records to images, and then publish out your “collection” and you can consume it via a webpage using the Silverlight PivotViewer control. One awesome example of this is here http://netflixpivot.cloudapp.net/. But what I have been really trying to wrap my head around is how to use the as a “business” tool. Because, it is easily technically doable, but you have to have a *reason* to do it.

Working with widgets and customers and locations – what do you do? There are two things I could think of quickly. One – peruse your “master data” very fast and visually. The other is looking at some kind of metrics for your widgets, or logos of your customers you might sell too, or ? ..Well, you could..

Master Data/Catalog

Show pictures of your widgets, and create filters (they call them facets) for things like size, color, weight, model, etc. You have “one” of each and you just want to see what you offer. Almost could be a pretty sweet online catalog browser

Sales/Metrics

Do the same as a master data catalog but allow filtering by some kind of metric. Shipped items over a given time or something.

Something Else I Haven’t Thought Of?

Anyways, the first thing you should do before anything is get some kind of data feed. Run a query, get some data from somewhere. Start small to test. 500-1000 records.

Then the fun begins. Starting from absolute scratch..

Windows 7 (make sure you have IIS installed !)

Visual Studio 2010 (installed .NET 4 Framework, and will set it up in IIS for you)

Note, you have to make your web part of your project IIS based instead of the build in web browser. Why? Because the .cxml HAS to be hosted on a web server, it just works that way.

Now, you need to create your collection.. you can use a cmd line tool they offer on the PivotViewer site, they also have a c# library for automating things, but it is best to first just do it manually. So I used the tool they have as an add on for excel. It adds a nice little “Pivot Collections” tab

You can use this to put some data in, you probably want to add more columns than what they give you by default. For my test I just used the same image for all records to get started. I have a feeling that the biggest barrier to entry to corporate BI teams and developers is going to be the imagery. You usually don’t have someone on your BI Team that knows how to use photoshop well and do all the high res imagery, so you are handcuffed there.

For testing sake, I Published my collection to the root of my website, with the name “MyWidgets”.

I loaded up my webpage, and I can slice and dice by all my columns I had in my collection, visually.. pretty dang awesome. (Note, I just made some fake data based on attributes I am used to seeing and with an image of a bike to see what it would look like – the goal was figuring out how would this work in conjunction with current BI offerings (cubes/Pivot Tables, SSRS, PowerPivot, etc))

Now, if you think where you could take this. Each “image” is clickable and brings up the image right in front of you. You could have all the specs of that widget there, and a link to “buy”, or deeper analytics for that widget.

Some other things I found out.. using the Excel tool for Pivot Collections is dog slow. Especially with a ton of records. It has to process the images for the “deep zoom” technology and it just takes a while. Like, hours.

There are tons of possibilities here with PivotViewer, both for an external website and also internal corporate business intelligence. It will give people another way to delve into the data and turn it into information.